Fórum de Reflexão Económica e Social

«Se não interviermos e desistirmos, falhamos»

sábado, abril 25, 2015

Liverdade’s trip to Portugal

The unit of democracy of the Economic and Social Reflection Forum (strictly speaking, only some of its members, lest anyone belonging to the Forum gets uneasy with the generalization) has invited Mrs. Liverdade to visit our country at this time, when people celebrate the 41st anniversary of the April 25 Revolution. In Portuguese “liverdade” results from the wedding between “liberdade” (freedom) and “verdade” (truth). In the end of the trip there was a pleasant and enriching conversation during some hours in which she wove high praise to our people, climate, food, history and nature, followed by a range of images that flatter greatly the Nation.

Liverdade has got some singular features such as a peculiar and aquiline form of analyzing and describing what she observes as well as a sweet and comforting tone when she talks. Passionate about those features, the Forum has asked her that, under a personal and succinct style (with comprehensive answers and words on the tip of the thought), she described 41 themes based on the registration made during the trip. The approach this woman has about the World and the attention she deposits in our country confirm that she should do regular and lasting visits to Portugal. Although Liverdade is foreign, she expresses in Portuguese as well as ourselves do, being confused with a national citizen by operation of law.

If democracy was older, more subjects would be asked her to comment. It is advised that decision-makers of the Lusitanian way read carefully the Lady Liverdade’s ideas. As a promoting of “liverdade”, she is an example for all democracies, from the most incipient to the most consolidated. In the next visit to our land it is required that a State personnel takes charged of providing her welcome, and that, before her return, the President of the Portuguese Republic honors the affection she has given to our people.

1. Carnation Revolution

The Carnation Revolution was born with the army’s wise decision of diverting the route of a ship that for a long time was walking to its luck and that it was nearly going to hit against dark and dangerous rocks. Being the route diverted, it was set up a rough sketch of the new path, which by now seems not to leave the paper. It was changed from the leak danger to the stranding danger, so another revolution urges to decide and to design. It must also be peaceful but much stronger, this time born mainly by civilians.

2. Equal opportunities

Equal opportunities principle is the placebo of inequalities among citizens. There will be genuine equal opportunities in a society when people accept the role reversal: disassembling who rides a horse, and assembling who walks on foot. So everyone would become versatile and would be gifted of a wider range of skills to face the challenges: each person would know to ride a horse and to walk on foot.

3. Cynical societies

In cynical societies, under the cloak of healthy interaction between promotion of equal opportunities and combating social exclusion, people tolerate who at the same time feeds plentifully the ego of opulence and abundance as well as other soul addictions and by contrast atones himself looking for feeding with few crumbs the sufferers’ body.

4. Social inequalities

While there are honorable citizens who do fall dawn into poverty and others rich citizens who do not know the honor, it is under fire the fallacy that equal opportunities solves social inequalities.

5. Social cruelty

A democratic country with a part of its children – at least 20% – below the poverty line is not poor; it is cruel. Additionally to social fratricide, cruelty reveals the majority of its citizens has got gallinaceous mind because, in spite of feeling the future and the survival are in danger, the same majority insists butting the glass wall only by the inability to deviate from the obstacle. Who relativizes the reality comparing with worse situations in other countries lives surely in a poultry house well above the threshold aforementioned.

6. Extreme poverty

The richest people live in extreme poverty more times than the others because they do ignore often injustices. Voters should decide what level of poverty must be tolerated.

7. Loneliness estuary

Loneliness is one of the most levelling and less equitable feelings. It is quite levelling because it attacks all social strata, rich and poor people, and it places them at similar levels. It is inequitable because by the estuary the way is different: when loneliness attacks a rich person, this person gets worse because he becomes poor; but when it attacks a poor person, the same person stays about the same because he does not move from poor.

8. End of hunger

Hunger joins forces often with the Nature to give lessons the Man how wrong many of his decisions have been taken, such as turning the land fertility in cement and asphalt areas without any hesitation or criterion. Therefore, killing the hunger is unlikely as ending the war or as assuring the man respects the Nature.

9. Countries and States

Country majority should be proportional to State minority. The greater the nation sustainability degree, the smaller the gap between the incomes of chieftains and corporations that depend on the State and the incomes of folk, the true picture of any country.

10. Incoherent societies

The power is to people as the State is to country. A society runs coherently if national resources are distributed on the basis of both the minor weight of the power and the major weight of the people. Utopian situations of rich countries with poor States and frequent cases of poor countries with rich States are examples of incoherent societies.

11. Social disorder

Social disorder comes out originally from the functional inconsistency extension between the groups of the (minor) power and the (major) people to the personal inconsistency among the elements of each those groups.

12. State of citizenship

A State of citizenship is characterized by the democratic correctness, singularity where democratic values are above democratic players, or rather where pure respect for the citizens’ dignity is above the (even though legitimate) political, corporative and individual interests.

13. Money universality

Money is the most universal solvent. Everything is dissolved in the money: from the addictions that lead to drop of both rich and poor people to the attempts to eliminate the same addictions.

The force that decides is not physical but spiritual. The need feeds and puts on weight physical force; the humility builds and enhances spiritual force.

16. Weakness ranked

Worse than the credulous weakness, which abounds in resigned people who give up fighting, is the trembling weakness, which proliferates in addicted people who insist on not changing. Accepting the first is abdicating citizenship; accepting the second is disbelieving in democracy.

17. Example of resignation

Portuguese fishermen have a so huge resignation that it does not fit in the sea and a so tiny hope that it does not fill in a hand.

18. Fog of hope

Hope will come in the fog, fly over the trees and reap some of its fruits and, after it is delighted and cozy, it will land on the boat of fishermen who engage spending time and energy into the river to catch some fishes for their sustenance.

19. Future of Lusatlântida

The future enlargement of the Exclusive Economic Zone will mark the birth of a new and potentially prosperous nation: Lusatlântida. However there will be no surprise that it will be also extend the closed season of bread at fishermen’s table.

20. People’s character

Granite stones on the ground are elected, which consolidate the folk’s strength that suffers but cries just for himself.

21. Welfare State

Welfare State is the sparrow of the politics. «All birds eat corn but the sparrow is always the guilty.» Despite everybody, with greater or lesser extent, benefits the State, especially the huge business contracts with the public sector invariably harmful to the latter, welfare State is a target of constant criticism: or for being large, or for being small, or for being neither large nor small.

22. Mechanization and solidarity

The greater the mechanization, the greater production volume achieved and the lower required workforce. Additional profits and bulky unemployed people. Mechanization is therefore an automatic process to increase institutional solidarity and welfare State, or alternatively to expand charity and poverty.

23. Humanistic societies

In humanistic societies compassion and dignity protection are not an option surrendered to concerned citizens’ mercy; in contrast they should be a State enforcement aware of its duties. Natural unequal income distributions are mitigated by taxation of the strongest and by solidarity, not by sympathy for the weakest or by charity.

24. Supreme solidarity

In the pitch-loneliness an old lady with dark nails overcomes time sharing her meager bread with tens of pigeons’ incessant hunger. The only witness is a stone cross that, in attentive silence, applauds such model of supreme solidarity.

25. Attested seriousness

Businesses are fair when they are beneficial for both parties – it is a cliché. To assess and recognize their usefulness, it is essential that the parties have a similar information level, and that the usefulness perception is not limited to the time of negotiating act. The maximum level of rare attested seriousness is achieved by who has the decency to warn the others contracting parties that, unlike these parties understand, the business is not fair for themselves because one of those two conditions is not fulfilled.

26. Errors and remorse

The error is to sin as remorse is to repentance. Additionally, as the sinners’ redemption relieves the souls, the error is a learning source and even of possible future happiness. As the penitent’s judgment afflicts the souls, remorse is a sadness source and often constant agony. Each person has an own errors scale and remorse scale. Blessed are those who meet errors but live without remorse.

27. Pain and grudge

A person’s pain leads to the teaching and internal peace, whereas the grudge leads to the resentment and external war.

28. Horizon of wisdom

A person reaches the supreme wisdom as the same he broadens the horizon of own actual capacities. That wisdom is by beginning to know the line between curable lack of knowledge and chronic ignorance.

29. Stubbornness and opinion

Assertive stubbornness is usually mixed with sure opinion when both of them reflect indeed different approaches. The first is unilateral and emotional whereas the second is bilateral and rational. Stubbornness is the result of instinct and the expression that an idea with solid subjective support represents a dogma. Instead, opinion is the result of the work based on a previous objective analysis even if poorly done, therefore it is much more frequent correcting or reversing sure opinions than assertive stubbornness.

Partisan bipolarization is like painting a two-color world, which is not necessarily worse than living in multicolored worlds; it depends on the players. Sometimes the anarchy of colors addresses the issue whether it is preferable a multicolored world leading to the blindness arrest rather than a dusty world that forces the thought freedom. Therefore, more than the number of colors, the most relevant is the type of colors that the parties use.

32. Emigration process

Emigration is a changing process of the lap homesickness. In the first stage, the homesickness transported upon the departure sadness turns into growing courage to create value. The process ends at the time of the happiness return with new ideas on suitcase, with which the future thrives.

33. Cluster of emigration

So evil for the country that knows no emigration: or it lives the utopian madness of having all people resigned, or it lives the dictatorial punishment of having all people castrated. Therefore, it is put the challenge of changing a timeless inevitability into a future cluster. Each country must decide what kind of emigration it wants to identify with: emigration based on the value and the head or based on the strength and the heart.

34. Prize awarding

Everyone is happy when accepts a prize awarded for attested merit. A person is triply happy if it is declined a prize taking into account: the merit awareness; the pleasure of enjoying the decline moment to be the voice of discreet or suppressed unrecognized talents; and the silent accusation oriented to vain award-winners that do not have the humility to return tarnished rewards when it is proved the prizes are subsequently undeserved.

35. Social entrepreneurship

If much of the individual entrepreneurship publicly disclosed is little more durable than festivities with fireworks, the so exciting social entrepreneurship is an episode of blank powder not few times trivialized and vandalized. Who is selfless and has a humanistic sense that forces thinking beyond the first person does not need to associate with the social entrepreneurship. That person thinks and acts on behalf of collective utility, without spending time with the coming of laurels that quickly dry out and are without their natural properties.

36. Types of happiness

Happiness can be supreme, earthly or obscene. Who attains the supreme happiness struggles for common good, regardless of effect caused in own self-interest, even sometimes selfless. Who gets the earthly happiness has the awareness to prevent that the defense of individual good brings damage for common good. Who reaches the obscene happiness wants the best for own person, no matter what happens to common good. The first is rare and the second should be normal; but the third is perhaps the most regular.

37. Nobel innovation prize

The first Nobel innovation Prize should be awarded to whoever had the ability to articulate politics with honesty, pruning the power vices and grafting the same power honor principles to promote the best interests of common good and collective future.

38. Madness and deceit

There are two ways for people fly without aid machines: or trusting blindly in their own illusions or in others’ lies. Both ways are not efficient: the first, for lack of adherence to reality; the second, for lack of adherence to truth. However the former is much less polluting; the personal madness of who, under an own willing, does not conduct the fate is better than the collective deceit that, for manipulation, defaces the candid people’s fate.

39. Truth and independence

People are independent if they think on their own initiative and their political representatives follow the truth. These two conditions only happen when citizens have the unusual humility to require such truth and to recognize that only with truth the justice is reached. Who believes it is difficult to reach the truth is wrong. Truth is reached with two simple but valuable ingredients: bread and education.

40. Secure bridges

The safest bridges link very different margins of thoughts. The development level of a society is proportional to its bridges of thought. The separation ideas raised as power signal are hit in bunkers of thought which will be destroyed and run under the bridges.

41. Unconditional freedom

Unconditional freedom is an illusion because it requires that citizens’ thought is unconditional and free of any order. There are thoughts about clear and universal truths that depend on authorization to refloat and sail. It is the revolution in freedom still to do; this time only civilians can accomplish it.